Marxists Ban Diversity of Opinion on Campus
Diversity? U of T President Robert Birgeneau is
Waging a New War on Merit
By Joshua J. Somer | The Varsity | 04-05-01
A couple of weeks ago, conservative columnist David Horowitz sent a paid advertisement to 50 American college newspapers outlining the reasons for his belief that reparations for slavery are a bad idea. Forty-eight papers refused to run the ad for fear of offending minority students. For the two papers that did run the ad, UC-Berkely and UC-Davis, both paper editors apologized for allowing Mr. Horowitz to express his opinion.
At University of Wisconsin, an information brochure sent to prospective students featured a large photograph of students cheering on the school football team. The photo made sure to maintain an “ethnic balance” and featured an equal number of white, Black, Asian and Hispanic students. It turned out the photo was a fake. In the original photo, the cheering students were all white. The administration found this offensive and super-imposed photographs of minority students into the photo.
A professor of drama at Arizona State University was denied tenure because of his insistence on teaching the works of William Shakespeare. The head of the department maintained that Shakespeare was “racist and sexist” and not appropriate content for university students. After the professor’s dismissal, the department chair vowed to “kill off the classics”. Hamlet was replaced by “Betty the Yeti: An Eco Fable”, in which a feminist environmentalist leaves her husband to go live “in harmony with nature” and begins a sexual affair with a sasquatch.
All of these assaults on the honour and integrity of higher education were committed in the name of “diversity”. The focus of academia these days, it seems, is not reason, not the pursuit of knowledge, not the preparation for a career but rather something called “multiculturalism.” Most people are quick to accept this new code and even applaud it. After all, this is about tolerance and equality, right? No, it’s not. “Ethnic diversity” is merely racism in a politically correct disguise.
Many people have a superficial view of racism. They see it merely as the belief that one race is superior to another. Racism is more than that. It is a fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, view of human nature. Racism is the notion that one’s race determines one’s identity. It is the belief that one’s beliefs, one’s values and one’s character are not determined by the independent judgement of one’s mind, but by one’s anatomy or blood.
The scourge of multiculturalism, long a staple of American university life, is now casting its ominous shadow over Canadian higher education and it seems the University of Toronto is ground zero.
A student who applied to U of T’s law school was refused admission due to his poor results on the LSAT. Rather than acknowldege his own shortcomings and vow to work harder in future, he denied personal responsibility and attributed his failure to racism. The LSAT, you see, is culturally biased.
Dr. Chun, a professor at U of T was overlooked for a promotion. Rather than acknowledge that he lost out to better-qualified candidates, again he blamed racism and sued the university. Rather than show Dr. Chun the door, the university capitulated to his blackmail, awarded him a generous settlement and promised a lucrative contract.
If this is bad, it just got worse. Now, the university has gone too far. In a speech marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial discrimination, U of T President Dr. Robert Birgeneau, obviously possessing a delightful sense of irony, actually introduced a plan to INCREASE racial discrimination. In the name of “diversity”, Dr. Birgeneau has now declared war on merit in education. No longer will the university base its faculty hiring decisions on a professor’s experience, qualifications or skills, they will now make a special effort to hire faculty who represent a visible minority.
After pointing out that over fifty per cent of U of T students are visible minorities, compared to only ten per cent of faculty, Birgeneau used the brazenly asinine logic that minority students would be more comfortable learning from a professor of the same ethnic group. Dr. Birgeneau declared that “The University of Toronto will be measured, in part, by how reprsentative its faculty is of its student body”.
The administration can label this as “diversity” or “multiculturalism” all it wants. What this really is is racism, plain and simple. To assume that minorities are only comfortable with professors of their own group is racist. To base hiring decisions, even in part, on a person’s race is racist. Worse, it is patronizing and insulting, a disservice to students and a new low for this administration.
Even if it were true that minority students would be more comfortable with faculty of their own race (which is an unfounded assumption and not true), perhaps President Birgeneau needs to decide whether this university is in the business of boosting kid’s self-esteem or whether it’s in the business of striving for academic excellence. And any student, of whatever background, who is more concerned about a professor’s race than with the merit of his work, simply has no business within the esteemed halls of higher education.
Advocates of diversity claim that because the real world is diverse, the campus should reflect that fact. But why should a campus reflect the ethnic population of the rest of society? No answer. In fact, the purpose of a university education is to impart knowledge and reasoning, not to be a demographic mirror of society.
Advocates of diversity claim that it will teach students to tolerate and celebrate differences. But the differences they have in mind are racial differences. In reality, a university SHOULD be a place of diversity. Intellectual diversity. Intellectual pursuits, after all, are the reason we’re here, right? And according to David Horowiitz “too often a university’s idea of diversity means a white Marxist, a Black Marxist, a Hispanic Marxist, and an Asian Marxist.”
It is racism, not any real sense of diversity, that drives this multicultural agenda on campus. The educationally significant diversity, the diversity of ideas – far from being sought after – is virtually forbidden on campus. The existence of “political correctness” blasts the academics’ pretense of valuing real diversity. What they really want is abject conformity.
The only way to eradicate racism on campus is to eradicate racist policies, such as those being advocated by President Birgeneau. The stain of racism will become a distant memory only when universities commit to an agenda befitting a great institution of learning, one based on the tenets that individualism, reason, knowledge and academic excellence are the principles of higher education. Universities should be based on the principle that deriving one’s identity from one’s race is corruption a corruption appropriate to fascism, but certainly not appropriate for a university that is based on freedom and independence.
